There’s an Event Apart happening in New Orleans this week, and one of the most interesting presentations is by Aarron Walter titled Findability Bliss Through Web Standards. Required reading, with no exceptions!

I love the presentation style, and am sad I wasn’t present to see Aarron’s talk in person.

This one is really cool, I wished all publishers did stuff like this.

In a nutshell, they make PDF copies of the book available as it is being written, and when it is finished they will ship you a paper copy of the final edition in the mail.

If you’re into Rails, or wanting to, you need to take advantage of this fantastic program, for this fantastic book. This is basically the seminal work for folks new to Rails. Penned by Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson and a cast of thousands, this book walks you through the whole history of why Rails was created in the first place, why the approach taken was chosen, and how to actually use the environment to your best advantage.

As well this book has an awesome style and is very accessible and easy to read. Good reading even if you don’t bother to actually work with Rails, as there is a lot of useful information in here for the software developer.

How’s that for a mouthful of a post title?

Oracle has recently released an updated InnoDB driver for MySQL, which has some pretty interesting features beyond the basic obvious-must-haves-for-clean-data features. As Alexey Kovyrin writes:

These interesting performance results obviously come from the fact that in addition to index pages compression (by default it is trying to compress 16kb pages down to 8kb) new innodb plugin performs TEXT/BLOB/VARCHAR fields compression off-page so every large TEXT field could become as small as a few bytes if its compression ratio is good. One thing I’d like to mention here that in our case we’ve actually tried a few possible options for compressed page sizes: 1k, 4k and 8k. Results were not so different because most of our data was in TEXT fields and there weren’t many other indexes aside from PRIMARY, but for some other cases it could make sense to try other page sizes (not default 8k) to make data set smaller.

Think about that for a second. If you’re chugging around a big fat database and have random reads on tables that have BLOB columns then you’re in for a big treat.

The SML Blog, formerly known as “Spacemonkey(b)labs”, has met a most unseemly and gruesome demise. First neglected, then ridiculed, and finally destroyed with both incessant software updates and errant (and somewhat clumsy) SQL experiments.

Although we loved the blog, and still love the engine that powered it (Typo), a decision has been made to use PHP tools for all of the SML websites exclusively from this point forward.

The Rails stuff will be used exclusively for all of the upcoming mitchitized sites, as well as several additional projects that have not been announced.

(We haven’t announced them yet, as we’ve been too busy blowing up the SML Blog.)

Rest assured the content and comments from the blog have been saved (thank you Postgresql!) and will resurface when we decide what the new PHP-based blog engine will be, and how it will be implemented.

As there are a ton of side projects coming up, we’re going to be very un-web-developer-like and resist the temptation to write a whole new blogging engine from scratch. Other than a decent layout this should be rather quick.

Again, apologies for the downtime (Mom seems to be the only person that has noticed so we don’t think it should be too big of a deal) and feel free to check back later.

Um, that is all.